Meet Marin Minamiya, Japan’s Youngest Explorer Prodigy
By 19, Marin Minamiya had quietly scaled two Himalayan mountains. Now she's skiing the North Pole.
Sipping her yuzu tea in a buzzy café in Tokyo’s Shibuya district, 20-year-old university student Marin Minamiya is exactly what you’d expect of a fashionable young Japanese woman. Her hair is long and shiny. Her fingernails are painted a sparkly gold. She laughs easily and punctuates her conversation with breathless, OMG-style exclamations. What you don’t expect is this: A few weeks later, she will be wrapped in up to seven layers of clothing, slogging through minus-70-degree temperatures, in an attempt to ski to the North Pole.
Minamiya—bubbly exterior, steely core—is one of Japan’s youngest and most high-profile adventurers. During her teens, she quietly broke a string of records. At 18, she
